Glacier Skywalk welcomes first visitors high above Sunwapta Valley

Visitors take in the opening day of the Glacier Skywalk near the Columbia Icefields on Thursday.

Photograph by: Gavin Young
, Calgary Herald

SUNWAPTA VALLEY — Against her better judgment, Chris Gitelson follows her childhood friend Aileen Sesso onto the glass floor of the Glacier Skywalk and sits down to soak in the mountain vistas.

They’re sitting 280 metres above the Sunwapta Valley, a craggy canyon with a winding river in Jasper National Park, on the controversial development’s opening day.

“I love it,” Sesso said Thursday. “I have a keen sense of adventure, so this is not scary for me.”

Gitelson, covering her eyes, isn’t so sure.

“I haven’t really looked down yet,” she said, taking a peek. “Oh, my God. Oh, I can’t stay here. I can’t. I can’t believe I’m sitting out here. You made me do this.”

Sesso, who has been friends with Gitelson for 62 years since they were Grade 1 classmates in Brooklyn, N.Y., just laughs.

“You don’t even want to know the things I made her do when we were kids,” said Sesso, as the pair embarks on their latest adventure with their husbands in the Canadian Rockies.

It’s a perfect blue-sky day to kick off the inaugural season of the skywalk.

The $21-million, award-winning project is an accessible walkway on the edge of a cliff that leads to the glass-bottomed observation platform extending 30 metres over the Sunwapta Valley on the Icefields Parkway.

It passed an environmental assessment in 2012, but has drawn opposition from environmentalists and Jasper residents due to concerns about the privatization of a national park site and the potential ecological impact — particularly for mountain goats.

Visitors from Alberta said they weren’t sure what to expect, due to the controversy, but suggested the structure fits with the natural environment.

“It’s amazing,” Adele Schwartz and Dawn Kuzio, both from Morinville, said in unison.

The structure, which required 200 metric tonnes of steel, is anchored into the cliff face of the mountain.

David Brady, a Cochrane resident, said he doesn’t see any major environmental issues.

“I was questioning how is it going to blend in, and it’s blending in well,” he said. “Time will tell. Coming down the highway, it’s not a huge eyesore.”

Officials with Brewster Travel Canada, which owns the skywalk, said they’ve dealt with any outstanding concerns.

“To us, now that it’s here and it’s built, that controversy no longer surrounds the project,” said Juliette Recompsat, communications manager for Brewster. “We did extensive environmental monitoring and assessment just to make sure the wildlife in the area wouldn’t be affected, and what that’s shown is that there hasn’t been a change at all.

“That’s great, because that means people get to come up here and interact with wildlife.”

On Thursday, several bighorn sheep were spotted in the area.

Recompsat said one of the priorities for the project is to get people out of their cars and connecting with the environment in the national park.

“It’s one of those places where everything stops. Nothing else matters,” she said. “You’re here with your family and doing something you’ve never done before.

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